Oak Ridge education chief Tom Bailey said he has personal knowledge of a child being killed in his or her own school.

“A child was stabbed to death in the high school where I was principal,” the retiring city schools superintendent told The Oak Ridger just days after a mass shooting of Sandy Hook Elementary School students and teachers in Newtown, Conn.

Bailey said schools can make all kinds of safety plans, but often you can’t “prevent anyone from doing anything.”

“I’m convinced it’s most important to create a culture, involve parents and instruct anybody who hears someone talk about it to share it,” he said. As an example, the school chief said that in Oak Ridge students told a teacher and a principal that a student had a gun.

“We got them help,” Bailey recalled. “Had we not heard, it (a shooting) could have happened.”

Bailey didn’t say when the gun incident occurred or at which Oak Ridge school.

“You don’t control a person who’s unstable,” he said. “The reality is that if someone gets it in their mind to do something like in Connecticut, getting in the building we may not be able to control but we can make it tougher.”

Locally, Bailey said many schools have some of those tougher controls — such as a buzzer system — and, in one school, an entrance was changed.

“It’s an additional layer at least to have to buzz in,” he said.

Another action that can be taken, the school superintendent suggests, is to sit down as a collective group with the Oak Ridge Police Department and the Anderson County Sheriff’s Office and maybe discuss “having someone trained and armed — even a retired officer — but having someone in the building should an intruder come in.”

The outgoing city schools superintendent also said he wished teachers had a way to secure classroom doors in addition to locks. He said most doors have glass, which can be broken.

Bailey said he’d like to have a school resource officer in every school in Oak Ridge, but “if we cannot get SROs, maybe an armed officer trained in a weapon. If we can’t afford that then maybe we could use a retired officer who we perhaps could pay less or security guards who are trained.

“In reality,” Bailey concluded, “it’s up to what a community wants to pay to put additional people in schools to protect the kids.

“We can’t predict where it could happen,” the superintendent said. “Ninety-six schools (in the country) this year had shootings.”